February 18, 2026

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February 18th, 2026.

Today, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker delivered the state of the state address.

The underlying purpose of the address is to explain the state budget,

but Pritzker, a Democrat, used the occasion to talk far more broadly about the state of Illinois

and the nation.

Pritzker anchored his speech by reaching back to the days of John Peter Alt-Geld,

a German-born American who helped to lead the progressive movement

and served as Governor of Illinois from 1893 to 1897.

Alt-Geld oversaw passage of some of the strongest laws in the country

for workplace safety and protection of child workers,

invested heavily in education, and appointed women to important positions in state government

despite the fact that women could not yet vote.

Pritzker noted that in his state of the state speech in January 1895,

Alt-Geld talked about the need to ensure that science would govern the practice of medicine

in Illinois, the high cost of insurance, the condition of Illinois prisons,

the funding of state universities, a needed revision of election laws,

the concentration of wealth in large businesses.

Alt-Geld expressed pride for appointing women to office and stated that justice requires

that the same rewards and honors that encourage and incite men should be equally

in reach of women in every field and activity.

Pritzker said he brought up Alt-Geld's defensive equal rights to highlight one enduring human truth.

In justice can become a genetic condition we bequeathed on future generations

if we fail to face it forthrightly.

Pritzker then turned to the year that has passed since Donald J. Trump took office.

To be perfectly candid, Pritzker said.

As Illinois is one of the states whose taxpayers send more dollars to the federal government

than we receive back in services,

I was hoping that his threats to gut programs that support working families

were the kind of unrealistic hyperbole that fuels a presidential campaign,

but then is abandoned when cooler heads prevail.

But he said, unfortunately, there are no cooler heads at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.

The Trump administration has cost Illinois $8.4 billion, Pritzker said,

illegally confiscating money that has already been promised and appropriated by the Congress

to the people of Illinois.

Pritzker was clear that this money is not handouts,

but dollars that real Illinoisans paid in federal taxes

and that have been constitutionally approved by our elected Democratic

and Republican representatives in Washington.

Unlike the federal government, states must balance their budgets every year.

Trump's billions in illegally withheld funds inflict a cost on the state's residents.

While Illinois has been forced to spend enormous time and taxpayer money

going to court and fighting to get what is rightfully ours,

Pritzker said, it is impossible to tally the hours, days and weeks our state government has spent

chasing news of presidential executive orders, letters and edicts that read like proclamations

from the lollipop guild.

Pritzker noted that Trump is making life harder for everyday Americans with tariffs that

raise costs for working families and small businesses, trade wars that are devastating farmers,

cuts to health care, nutritional assistance and education, increased bureaucratic demands on states

and low job creation.

The good news, Pritzker said, is that Illinois had managed such crises before and had found a way

forward. He noted the growth of the state's economy and economic stability over the past

eight years, even as the state had balanced its budget every year and made historic investments

in education, child welfare, disability services and job creation in the private sector.

In the past year, Illinois's gross domestic product was more than $1.2 trillion

up from $881 billion when Pritzker took office.

Looking forward, Pritzker outlined plans to address the top three economic issues on the mind

of most Americans, the cost of housing, electricity and health care. He promised to reduce the cost

of housing by cutting local regulations and providing more options for financing.

He promised to address the skyrocketing cost of electricity first by pausing the authorization

of new data center tax credits and then by investing in renewable energy and nuclear power.

Finally, he announced that as of this week, the state had eliminated a billion dollars in medical

debt for more than 500,000 people in the state by purchasing and erasing it for pennies on the dollar.

Pritzker warned that the benefits of our changing world are increasingly reaped by a smaller

and smaller group of people while middle and working class Americans pay for it.

Special interests and large corporations seem to delight in finding ever more insidious ways

to extract money from everyday people. Those same companies then react with a mixture of

surprise and outrage when they're asked to rein in their worst abuses.

I'm committed to doing everything government can to rein in the worst of the price gouging and

profiteering we're seeing. Pritzker said, but I implore the titans of industry who regularly ask

government to make their lives easier. What are you doing to make your employees and your

customers lives easier? Then Pritzker turned to the crisis federal agents created on the street

of Chicago. A year ago, I stood before you and asked a provocative question. After we have

discriminated against, disparaged and deported all our immigrant neighbors and the problems we

started with still remained, what comes next? Pritzker said. He recalled that when he asked that

question, some people walked out. But a year later, we have an answer, don't we? He said,

masked, unaccountable federal agents with little training, occupied our streets, brutalized our people,

tear-gassed kids and cops, kidnapped parents in front of their children, detained and arrested

and at times attempted to deport U.S. citizens and killed innocent Americans on the streets.

Pritzker identified Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the

architects of that plan to drip authoritarianism into our veins. But he noted, people in Illinois

did not accept that authoritarianism. Pritzker reminded the audience that President Grover Cleveland

had similarly tried to subdue the Illinois population with hired thugs during the 1894

Paulman strike after the Paulman company, which made railroad cars, cut workers wages by about

25%. When workers struck, Cleveland deputized U.S. marshals to end the strike. They fired into

crowds of bystanders and, according to a Chicago paper, seemed to be hunting trouble.

25 people died and more were wounded before the strike ended.

Altgeld had opposed the arrival of federal troops and his fury at their intrusion still

smoldered when he gave his state of the state speech almost six months later.

If the president can, at his pleasure, send troops into any city, town, or hamlet whenever and

wherever he pleases under pretense of enforcing some law, Altgeld wrote, his judgment, which means

his pleasure being the sole criterion, then there can be no difference whatever in this respect

between the powers of the president and those of the Tsar of Russia.

Pritzker joked that he wished he could spend just one year of my governorship presiding over

precedented times. I yearn for normal problems, he said, but these are not normal times.

I've been thinking a lot lately about love, about loving people and loving your country,

and the power involved in both, the governor said. I know right now there are a lot of people out

there who love their country and feel like their country is not loving them back. I know that.

But he told those people that your country is loving you back, just not in the way you're used to

hearing. It's not speaking in anthems or flags or ostentatious displays of patriotism.

It will never come from the people who say the only way to love America is to hate Americans.

Love is found in every act of courage, large and small, taken to preserve the country we once knew.

You will find it in homes and schools and churches and art. It is there. It has not been squashed.

Pritzker called out the love shown by the bicyclers who showed up in little village every day

during Operation Midway Blitz to buy out tamale carts so the vendors could return to the safety of

their homes. The parishioners who form human chains around churches so that immigrants could

worship and the moms in the school pickup line who whipped out their cameras and their whistles

and in the face of every Midwesterner who put on their heaviest coat and protested outside on

the coldest day. That love for one's neighbor, he suggested, is the country's most powerful tool

against the rise of authoritarianism. I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans,

my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy

or political party," Pritzker said. We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization

rooted in empathy and kindness or one rooted in cruelty and rage.

I love my country," Pritzker said. I refuse to stop. The hope I have found in a very difficult year

is that love is the light that gets you through a long night.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at

Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.